


Loving Someone

by fascra



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Coming Out, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gay Sam Winchester, LGBTQ Character, LGBTQ Themes, M/M, Pre-Canon, Sam Winchester-centric
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-29
Updated: 2020-06-29
Packaged: 2021-03-04 00:20:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,723
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24984469
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fascra/pseuds/fascra
Summary: He’s known for a while that he’s not like Dean, or even their dad, who might not be the flirt Dean is but still likes to give pretty waitresses a once over. But that doesn’t mean he’s gay. Right? If Sam were gay, he’s pretty sure he’d know by now.
Relationships: Dean Winchester & Sam Winchester, Sam Winchester/Other(s)
Comments: 22
Kudos: 196





	Loving Someone

When Sam is in the eighth grade he asks Kayla Jones out. He doesn’t know if he really _likes_ her likes her, but all his friends say she’s pretty, and Dean had his first kiss when he was only eleven. He doesn’t wanna be the lame one out, the last guy his age to get a girlfriend, even if no one at his next school will know. So he grits his teeth and sets his shoulders and walks up to her lunch table with a tissue-paper flower he made in art class, and she smiles and blushes and says yes.

He spends all of the next couple days jittery with nerves—enough that his dad notices, which is saying something—but in the end, it doesn’t really matter. They’ve barely gotten their milkshakes at the diner down the road from the middle school when he can feel it going wrong. Kayla sits with her backpack in her lap, and it’s so tall it almost blocks her face. She leans on it and fiddles with the straps.

“Um,” Sam says. “Is everything okay?”

“I’ve got to tell you something.” She jabs the straw in and out of the milkshake lid with a screeching noise that makes Sam want to cringe. “But you have to promise not to tell anyone.”

Sam hears this a lot when he’s out with his dad interviewing witnesses for a job. People trust him more than they trust his dad or Dean—Dean says it’s because he’s still a kid, but Sam prefers to think it’s because he’s trust _worthy_ , and people can see it. Sam doesn’t make fun of witnesses as soon as he gets in the car, not like his brother and dad do. And if there’s anything he’s good at, it’s keeping a secret.

“Kayla,” he says, “you can tell me anything.”

She glances up at him and takes a deep breath. “I’m gay,” she blurts out. “I didn’t wanna say it in front of everyone—some of my friends know, but not all of ‘em would be cool about it, and I really, really don’t want it to get back to my parents.”

“Oh,” Sam says and blinks at her a couple times. It’s pretty much the last reason he expected to get rejected. He’s never even met a gay person before, he doesn’t think. To be honest, he wasn’t sure gay girls existed outside of the porn he knew Dean sometimes watched, and Kayla didn’t seem anything like that. “How do you know?” Her face falls, and he hastens to add, “Not that I don’t believe you!”

“I dunno,” she says. “I just—don’t have crushes on boys. Not like my friends do, they’re always after someone, or wanting someone to come after them. And I just wanna be with them, like when we were kids and cuddled on sleepovers and I just wanna be close to them.” She breaks off, flushing. “I know it sounds stupid.”

It doesn’t. _They’re always after someone, or wanting someone to come after them,_ and Sam thinks of Dean at his age, crushing on a red-head named Melissa and coming home after school to crash back on the motel bed and groan about how pretty and graceful she was, and _she even does ballet, Sammy, ain’t that something,_ and Sam remembers thinking then that he’d never understand feeling that way about a girl. 

“Oh,” he says.

“I’m really sorry,” Kayla rushes on. “I didn’t mean, to, like, lead you on. I know some girls do that, I didn’t mean to. I just didn’t know what to say.”

“It’s cool,” he says, but he isn’t really listening anymore. He feels stupid, just realizing now that there are gay kids his age, but it feels like a door swung open. He thinks of Jeremiah in his gym class, with his dark clear skin and bright smile and the way Sam felt when he hugged him after they won their flag football game, and he thinks, _oh._

They’ve moved half-way across the country before Sam manages to grab a book on the subject. He can’t bring himself to ask a librarian for help, or even rummage through the catalog cards that are kept up front and center, but he knows the Dewey system well enough to know that homosexuality’ll be in social sciences, and that’s the three-hundreds. He must run his finger over hundreds of books before he gets to one that makes him pause. _Loving Someone Gay,_ it says, and he yanks it off to see two men sitting together, leaning into each other, all smiles. They look normal, Sam thinks, but he’s not his dad’s son for nothing, and he knows that just because they look normal doesn’t mean they are. 

Ever since he talked with Kayla in that diner in the middle-of-nowhere, Pennsylvania, he’s been thinking about this. He’s known for a while that he’s not like Dean, or even their dad, who might not be the flirt Dean is but still likes to give pretty waitresses a once over. But that doesn’t mean he’s gay. Right? If Sam were gay, he’s pretty sure he’d know by now. But that doesn’t mean it’s not worth looking into. Maybe there’s some sort of test, he thinks, and then he’ll know for sure.

He’s barely finished checking out when a hand clamps down on his shoulder. Sam doesn’t have to turn around to know who it is.

“I just finished, Dean,” he says, rolling his eyes while he shoves the gay book between his normal haul of novels and nonfiction. “What, you think I got kidnapped in the library?”

“Nah,” his brother says, using his hand to steer Sam towards the doors and out to the car waiting in the lot. “Did think you might be trying to move in between the stacks, though. You totally undersold the amount of time it takes you to grab—” he looks down, and Sam freezes, even though Dean doesn’t seem to see any titles “—four freaking books.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Sam makes a face and wills his pulse to slow down. “Not my fault you’ve got the patience of a- a-”

“A saint?”

“A werewolf on the full moon!” Sam declares triumphantly, and Dean laughs, taking the hand off his shoulder to ruffle his hair before pushing him towards the passenger door.

That night, reading _Loving Someone Gay_ beneath the covers of the motel bed with the blinding flashlight he usually only uses on hunts, Sam thinks about Dean’s hand on his shoulder, in his hair. He’s heard Dean make a million gay jokes, mostly at his expense, mostly while calling him Samantha. Dean’s never met a gay person, not that Sam knows of anyway, but he doesn’t get the feeling Dean has much respect for them. The book is operating on the assumption that everyone gay knows someone who doesn’t like them for it, and everyone not-gay has some sort of prejudice going on. Sam peaks out from the bedding, sees his brother passed out on the bed across from him, his back to Sam so that, should someone burst through the motel door, Dean can step between them.

He knows Dean loves him, even if they never say it. Dean has taken care of him since forever, always packing his school lunches and quizzing him on vocab and watching him even more carefully than their father on every single hunt. The only reason Dean hasn’t dropped out yet is so next year they can, however briefly, go to school together. But Dean always wants Sam to be more like him—wants him to get a girlfriend, wants him to love hunting, wants him to work on cars beside him. And every time Sam shrugs off another offer to go crouch behind an old Lincoln at Uncle Bobby’s, he knows Dean is disappointed, can see it in the line of his shoulders as he rolls his eyes and heads out without him.

Sam looks down at the dim-lit cover and traces the smiles of the men with his thumbnail. What he wants, more than anything, is for this not to be one more thing that makes him different. At school, Sam’s a nerd, a prep, a nobody. He doubts most of his classmates remember him a semester after he’s gone. And at home, with Dad and Dean—he’s weird there too. Not like the rest of them. Dean’ll never say it, but god knows Dad has.

He shuts the book and tucks it under the mattress. He turns off the flashlight. The light of the highway shines through the crack in the curtains that won’t close no matter how hard they tug, and Sam falls asleep watching the blue and red lights flicker across his fists as he clenches and unclenches them, again and again.

He doesn’t try dating girls again. When Dean asks, or points him towards the pretty younger sisters of his own dates, he stammers and blushes and Dean, thankfully, accepts it as shyness. But at school he starts gravitating away from the preppy, straight-A’s crew he’s always fit in best with and starts sitting with the drama clubs and the grunge girls. There, people dress weird, or at least weirder than Sam is used to—boys with eyeliner and girls with blue-dyed hair—and he knows they’re not gonna judge. 

He grows his hair long despite his dad’s snide comments and lets his bangs hang in his face, replaces his ratty blue sneakers with Dean’s old combat boots, and buys cheap second-hand Nirvana tees. In the mirror, he hardly recognizes himself. When he was younger, all three of them looked and dressed alike, since Dean just wanted to look like their dad and Sam just wanted to look like Dean. Now, when they go out, Sam stands out. He doesn’t look like just a Winchester anymore.

His dad finally cracks one Thursday after Sam’s _Our Town_ practice. Dean works most afternoons, leaving him to run home from the high school. It’s not too bad, just over four miles that Dean lets him count towards training out of some misplaced guilt, but his hair has gotten long enough that he’s stolen a couple of hair ties from the chick playing Emily to hold it back. His dad hasn’t been home in weeks, and while Dean teases him and grabs at his two-inch long ponytail during training, it hasn’t been half bad.

Until, of course, Sam bounds in the front door to face see his dad at the table cleaning his guns. “The hell you wearing?” 

Reflexively, Sam glances down at himself, but there’s nothing offensive there: too-short jeans he’s starting to outgrow, Dean’s old combat boots, a ratty Pearl Jam t-shirt he borrowed from a classmate in Arizona and never got to return. “What?”

“Your hair. You wearing it up, now?” 

He shrugs defensively, tosses his bookbag at his father’s feet, and goes to grab an off-brand Coke from the fridge. He feels his father’s eyes on his back, and barely resists the urge to pull the hair down. “Might be. Makes it easier to run, figure you oughta see the logic in that.”

“What I _see the logic in_ ,” his dad says slowly, “is cutting the thing before it becomes a liability.”

“If something wants to grab me, Dad, it’ll do it by my neck if not my hair.”

“No reason to give it a damn handle.”

Sam tenses his shoulders, turns around and leans against the counter. “It’s my hair. I’ll take the risk.”

“You taking a risk puts me and your brother in danger, too, ‘less you’re expecting us to just walk away and leave you at some fucker’s mercy.” His dad stands up, tosses down the shotgun he’s been oiling. “I’ve let you dress like—” he cuts himself off, gestures vaguely.

“Like what?” Sam glares.

“We’re not gettin’ into this now. You know the look you’re going for, and I’ve let you mess around with it, ‘cause I figure you give me enough hell without me caring about the little shit. But hair like a girl means gettin’ yanked around like one, and I’m not putting up with that.”

He swallows hard. “Who says you get a vote!” He tries to yell, but he hears his voice crack halfway through and hates himself for the weakness it shows. He knows his dad’s not gonna back down, but he can’t _not_ fight on this. It’s his hair. They’ve had the money to care about their appearance like other kids do, with expensive white sneakers and piercings and jewelry, but he’s always had at least this. He can control his body, even if he doesn’t have anything nice to put on it.

His dad's expression darkens, and he shoves past Sam to the one bathroom they all share and grabs Dean’s electric razor, shoving it into his hands. “You can cut it or I will,” his dad says, as if that’s a freaking concession, when his voice says it’s a threat.

Sam bobs on his heels. He wishes he were like Dean—tall and broad and strong enough to stand up to their dad, even if Dean never would. Instead, he’s five-six, stuck in a shitty apartment in Tulsa, Oklahoma, with no real friends and fifty-two cents to his name. “I hate this,” he says. “Every single bit of it.” 

He slams the bathroom door behind him, and spends ten minutes sitting on the closed toilet lid with his fists pressed against his eyes, holding back the stinging tears, before he gets up and does as he’s told.

Luis Navarro is two inches taller than him, wears a whole collection of wristbands ranging from Sam’s favorite bands to weird metal stuff he’s never even heard of, and is in his AP class—the only AP offered for sophomores in Leesville, Louisiana. Sam thinks he might have a crush.

At lunch, Luis sits with the stoners, which—okay, not Sam’s first choice, but he can make it work. When he walks over, Luis pats the seat next to him before Sam can even ask if he can join them.

“Sam here’s in my smart classes,” Luis introduces him. “Which makes him about three times as bright as you, Josh.”

Josh grunts.

“Josh just found out he’s failing English I,” Luis says in a stage whisper. So yeah, okay, maybe he’s a bit of a dick. Sam can’t bring himself to mind. “And that was with cheating off my midterm.”

“You need help?” Sam asks. Josh just glares.

“Anyway,” Luis goes on as if Sam hadn’t spoken, pointing at the other boys in turn. “That’s Greg, and that’s Manuel. They’re way less interesting than you, though. I can’t remember the last time we had a new kid here. Maybe seventh grade? You gotta tell us about yourself, man.”

“Um.” Sam might be a little busy staring at Luis’s jawline. “I move a lot. Been almost everywhere, it feels.”

“Done almost everything?” Luis says and raises an eyebrow.

Sam flushes. “Uh, no. Not everything I’d like to, anyway.”

“Like what?” Luis asks. He leans forward across the table.

Two weeks later, and they’re spending most lunches making out in the boy’s bathroom at lunch, and Sam hopes irreverently that his dad and Dean never catch the skinwalker that brought them to Leesville. On the many days he’s certain his family is out of town, he brings Luis back to the motel (still just a motel, no apartment, never a good sign) and they watch Twin Peaks and kiss more. Luis says when he graduates, he wants to go west, get some electrical job that’ll him let work wherever, move wherever. He wants to be free, he says.

When he’s an adult, Sam doesn’t want to ever move again. Still, he lays on his stomach with his head on his palm and listens and imagines moving with Luis, living in small houses not unlike the ones his dad sometimes rents. They’d fix them up, he and Luis. They’d make them into freaking homes.

“I swear I can’t live with my family any longer,” Luis says one day, staring up at the ceiling as the Twin Peaks soundtrack glides around the room. “They mean well, but they don’t get it. Back in Jalisco, both my parents lived at home ‘til they got married. I’m not like that. Hell, if I have a choice, I’d never get married.”

“Yeah?” Sam says, rubbing his thumb against the inside of Luis’s wrist.

“Yeah, why bother?” He shrugs. “What I need is a job. Then I can save up, get my own place. In a city, I hope.”

Sam hums noncommittally. “Think they’ll let you?”

“Let me? They won’t be able to stop me. Once I’m eighteen, they don’t have nothing over me.” Luis rolls over on top of Sam, bites Sam’s lip for a half-second. “They don’t gotta approve of what I do,” he says softly, their mouths an inch away. 

Let’s run away together, Sam wants to say, caught up in the way Luis’s skin seems to glow a tawny gold in the late-afternoon light. Let’s run away to Los Angeles and live in a loft on the beach and not tell our parents a goddamn word. But after Flagstaff, he doesn’t dare. Instead, he ropes a hand up into Luis’s hair and pulls him back down, hard.

Sometimes, during the many long days he spends in the backseat of the Impala watching the world pass by, Sam imagines telling Dean. The details change every time. Sometimes Dean already knows and has just been waiting for Sam to tell him, has already prepared a few well-intentioned jokes that he delivers with a ruffle of Sam’s hair. Sometimes Sam says it like it’s nothing, mentions going out with a guy like it’s _normal_ , and Dean rolls with it with a smile. Sometimes Dean just listens, leans across a diner table and looks Sam in the eye and waits for him to finish with the sort of patience he only has with women and witnesses.

It always ends the same in Sam’s mind. They’re in the Impala, no Dad so Sam gets shotgun, driving fast down backroads. Dean reaches over, wraps an arm around Sam’s shoulders and yanks him close, like they’re still little kids in the backseat, giggling and shoving at each other. They’re both grinning and the music is loud. 

Sam doesn’t daydream about telling his dad. He already knows how that story ends.

They move again. He can’t bring himself to tell Luis goodbye, but on the drive out of town, Sam curls up with his face to the seatback and cries a little into his sweatshirt sleeve. They pull into Pastor Jim’s at half-past midnight, and in the cool night air, he takes slow, deep breaths, and tells himself not to think about it again.

But that night he sneaks out of the room he shares with his brother and past his dad, who’s passed out at the kitchen table on top of whatever new research Jim was able to gather about demons. It’s much colder in Minnesota than it was in Louisiana, and he takes a moment on the porch to breathe in the sharp air. The sky is bright above him with stars and a big, heavy moon. 

Sam has broken into many churches with his family, but Jim’s sanctuary is the only one he’s ever gone to for a service. It’s small and white and doesn’t look like anything special, but as he creaks open the door and steps inside, he can feel himself relax. It’s places like this where he feels sure there’s someone watching over him. Dean would think him stupid for it, but for once, what Dean thinks doesn’t matter. Sam knows he’s not alone.

He sits in the front pew and stares up at the cross. Years ago, sitting cross-legged in a pew while his brother and Dad hunted a poltergeist across the state, this is where he memorized the Lord’s Prayer. Now, he whispers it quietly to himself: Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.

There’s so much he wants to ask for: no more hunting, his brother safe, his dad happy, someone that loves him who he won’t have to leave. He knows better, though. Monsters aren’t going anywhere, and if they were, it wouldn’t be for him. And as long as there’s something to hunt, his family will be like this: on edge, in danger, hopping from city to city just to throw themselves in the line of fire.

Instead, he settles for this. “Dear Lord,” he says quietly, “please forgive me for wanting a different future than the one you have laid before me. I can’t live like this. I want a safe life, a different life. Please, if you’re listening, help me get there. Help my family understand what I mean when I say I want to leave, and that it doesn’t mean that I don’t love them, or that, that I don’t want to be like them.”

The pale light, filtered through the stained glass, shifts. A cloud, Sam thinks, but he knows better than to dismiss any sign. He’s been a hunter too long for that. “Thank you,” he whispers, and closes his eyes.

Their dad drops them at Bobby’s a few months after Sam turns sixteen. It’s a bright, hot day. Sam sits cross-legged on the hood of a rusty Volvo rereading The Outsiders while Dean lays beneath the car next to him, fixing up something Sam doesn’t understand. Bobby’s old antenna radio has tuned into a Rolling Stones marathon, and Sam is hit suddenly with the thought that this is his life, the best of it. He’s spent a million days reading, breathing in the sharp scent of motor oil, bantering with his brother, and he’ll spend a million more, and suddenly he is sure he can do this.

“Dean,” he says, folding down the corner of his page and closing the book. “I’m gay.”

Dean snorts underneath the Ford. “You lose a bet with Bobby, kid?”

It takes a moment for him to understand what he means. “This isn’t a bet, jerk. I’m trying to tell you something here.”

“You’re not gay, Sam.” He swears he can hear his brother roll his eyes. 

“I am.”

“No,” Dean says, “you’re not. Trust me, I’d know if you were. I dunno if this is another part of the great Sam Winchester anti-hunting crusade, but—”

“You’re telling me I blew a guy back in Milwaukee just to piss Dad off?” Sam snaps. There’s a moment of dead silence before Dean rolls himself out from under the Ford, wide-eyed and staring at him.

“You what?”

“You heard me.” Sam can hear how defensive he sounds, like he’s spoiling for a fight, but he can’t help himself. This isn’t how he wanted it to go. “I’m gay. I don’t care if you think I can’t be because I’m not, not fucking wearing heels or makeup or something, but I am, so.”

His brother’s still sitting on the creeper seat. He looks totally, completely stunned, and some tiny, little-brother bit of Sam is stupidly proud of having kept this from him, of knowing something he hadn’t. “You really had sex in Milwaukee?”

“Not the point, Dean.”

“Yeah, it kinda is.” Dean finally rises off the creeper, rubbing a hand down his face to get rid of a streak of motor oil. “How long has this been a thing and I didn’t know?”

He shrugs. He feels small, suddenly, like a little kid in trouble, and he wants to go back in time just a couple minutes and hold onto the furious defensive anger, because this is so much worse. “I dunno.”

“Ballpark it.”

Sam swallows. “First kiss was September. In Louisiana.”

Dean lets out a low breath, shaking his head. “That Mexican kid? He was your, what, your boyfriend?” He draws out the last word like it’s from a foreign language.

He shrugs again.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” 

“I just… didn’t know how.” When he glances up, Dean is red in the face, angry enough that he adds, “Look, I’m telling you now, okay? I wanted you to know.”

“Sam….” Dean runs a hand down his face and sighs. “Fuck. Okay. Dad know?”

“What, are you stupid? Of course Dad doesn’t know.”

Dean nodded. “Okay. Okay, that’s—probably good. Look, you gotta tell me this shit, okay? I won’t make you tell Dad, but you can’t keep these kinds of secrets just ‘cause you’re embarrassed or whatever. I oughta know when you’re seeing someone—what if someone had hurt you?”

Sam snorted, crossed his arms and leaned back against the windshield. “Because you give me the name and number of every chick you sleep with?”

“Not the same, Sammy.”

“How is that not the same! Dean, I don’t want this to make it weird, okay? To make anything weird. I’m not—I’m not weaker just because of this, okay, and I’m not dumb enough to go off with anyone sketchy. Nothing needs to change.” His voice is wobbly by the end, and he can feel his cheeks heating up. 

Dean’s face softens a little. “Hey. I’m not mad or anything. I mean, I’m pissed you didn’t tell me, yeah, but the gay thing—it’s not a problem.”

Sam can feel himself nodding and, humiliatingly, sniffles a little. “Yeah.”

“Hey,” Dean says again. He moves over to the Ford, leans up against it, all up in Sam’s space. He’s smiling a little now. “It’s just a surprise, Sammy. I put up with your shitty taste in music and your health food diet, you think I care about this?”

“You hate my music,” Sam points out. He knows he sounds a little desperate. “I don’t—Dean, you know I don’t wanna be so different, okay? It’s not like—I wish I liked the same stuff you and Dad do, okay, I wish—”

“Oh, you do not. Come on, you think you’d be happy if you didn’t have school and your dumb books and those Nirvana tapes?” Dean elbows him a little. “Sam. I’m pretty sure if all three of us liked the same shit, we’d drive each other crazy. Not to mention we’d probably be dead somewhere without your geeky side of things.”

“Yeah,” Sam says. He hunches his shoulder a little. 

Dean sighs, rests his hands on the hood of the Ford just long enough to push himself up. “Scooch over, kid.” Sam does. Dean wraps an arm around his shoulders, like he’s still little and can be pulled tight against his brother’s chest to drown the rest of the world out. “You ever mention I said this girly shit, I will knock your lights out. But I like you how you are, little brother. All that other stuff—music and guys and whatever—come on, man. It’s not bad. It’s not even—it makes you Sam. Okay? Makes you my geeky little brother, and there’s no one else I’d want in my passenger seat.”

Sam doesn’t say anything, but he doesn’t have to. He leans into his brother’s chest, and together, they watch as the sun sets over the junkyard. They sit there for a long time in silence.

“Dean?” He finally asks. He’s watching the Impala glow in the evening’s light, and he’s suddenly, stupidly grateful that Dad switched to the truck all those months ago.

“Yeah?”

“Can we go for a drive?”

Dean smiles. He ruffles his hair. “Yeah, Sammy. We can go for a drive.”

There’ll be fights to have later: a rehash of why Sam didn’t tell him, whether Dad gets to know, if Dean’s allowed to go all caveman on Sam’s dates just because he knows how guys are. But right now the sun is low on the horizon and the tank is full of gas. Sam slides into the passenger seat, and lets it all wash over him like a wave.


End file.
